Introduction
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We'll cover the following
Infrastructure as Code (IaC) is the practice of provisioning computing infrastructure using machine-readable, declarative specifications or imperative code, rather than using an interactive configuration tool. IaC became increasingly popular with the rise of cloud computing. Infrastructure administrators who were previously maintaining long-lived infrastructure found themselves needing to scale in both agility and capacity as companies adopted cloud infrastructure.
Remember that at this time, software teams and infrastructure teams were unlikely to work closely together until a software project needed to be deployed. IaC created a bridge between infrastructure administrators and software developers by establishing a shared set of documents that described the desired infrastructure for the software project. The IaC specifications or code often live within or alongside the project. By establishing this shared context between software developers and infrastructure administrators, these two teams were able to work together earlier in the software development life cycle and establish a shared vision for infrastructure.
In this section, we'll start off by learning about how Terraform approaches IaC and the basics of its usage. After we have a handle on how Terraform works, we'll discuss Terraform providers and see how the vast ecosystem of providers can empower us to describe and provision a wide variety of resources, not just compute infrastructure such as virtual machines. Finally, we'll learn how to extend Terraform by building our own pet store Terraform provider.
Structure#
We will cover the following topics in this section:
Summary and Quiz on Creating Infrastructure Using Packer
An Introduction to IaC